Enterprise Content Management(ECM) combines the traditional content management, social capabilities, and powerful search, it is as natural to manage as it is to use. With its simple, “behind-the-scenes” administration, we can configure the content management to our use.

I would like to explain some of the aspects of Content Management in this article.

As we come across managing the content within an organization, we deal with metadata which is the data about data. MOSS 2007 has site columns as metadata which were very useful in organizing and searching data. SP2010 comes up with more such ease of managing your data and meta with concepts with content organiser, in place record management, document id and so on.

Let take Document ID feature first, so in SP2010 whenever any document is uploaded, it is assigned a unique Document ID which remains with the document throughout its life cycle irrespective of which library/site it is in. This makes documents easily searchable and more manageable. With the document ID,we can search it and locate its current position. Its always good to have one unique field associated with our content and this time SharePoint gives it to you by default.

SP2010 makes the use of managed metadata which was there in MOSS2007 but in a very efficient way. For that we first need to understand the concept of Term Store. A term store is a collection of Term Sets which is again a collection of Terms. Now terms are the tags which we define in central admin which can be used across our site collection level or web application level. We need to create a set of terms and name them according to our line of business (LOB). The set of these term sets are called term store. Now lets go to our document library settings and try adding a new field as managed metadata, it will bring you with the option to select yours tags, which are same as what we just defined in central admin now as term sets. We can select single or multiple tags as per the requirement. This makes our content easily manageable and fast searchable.

So we see that managed metadata connects our term sets and the content.

Another new feature In Place Record Management is another important feature by which we can declare a content as Record and it will behave in a specific way we assign. For that we have to initially configure how we want the records to behave and then declare the content (as required) as Record, using an inbuilt ribbon button. This separates that particular content from others and is very useful when we are dealing with archival of documents.

Content Organizer (Metadata driven) can create deep, hierarchical folder structures and manage retention at each folder in the hierarchy(or inherit from parent folder) and route incoming documents to the libraries. So we see that it can act as a post office where all the documents arrive and then routed to their specific houses from there. We can configure our emails to arrive here and based on rules (metadata), we can route our content.